Nursing Shortage and Mandatory Overtime, Article Critique Example

The nursing shortage has resulted in many issues that have a detrimental impact on patient care. Of the problems that the nursing shortage greats, this issue that has the negative impact on nursing and nursing practice in the workplace is the fact that nurses are regularly required to participate in mandatory overtime. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate why the nursing shortage leads to mandatory overtime in addition to proposing solutions that would eliminate this problem.

Summary of an Article

I have chosen to summarize the article “Nursing shortage: Looking to the future”, because it descriptively explains the outcome of the nursing shortage in society in addition to the stresses the nurses feel as a consequence (Roman, 2008). It also discusses that hospitals and other healthcare facilities should rethink this policy in order to be more effective practitioners. According to the article, when nurses aren’t required to work overtime, they feel that their management truly cares about them, which increases their want to perform well (Roman, 2008). To prevent the negative impacts of overtime, it is therefore necessary to find ways to overcome the nursing shortage. Ways to do so would be to increase nursing school enrollment and hiring staff from abroad (Aiken, 2002).

Relationship of the Issue to Nursing Workforce Trends

The consequences of mandatory overtime has detrimental outcomes in both the culture of the workforce in addition to treatment of patients. A nurse is able to perform his or her best when he or she is well rested and therefore able to think critically about the cases that are seen. When a nurse is required to work overtime, the additional stress can impact this process, which may result in inadequate medical care. Furthermore, nurses who are required to work overtime frequently will be less satisfied with their job, which will be reflected in their interactions with other healthcare personnel; when individual nurses demonstrate that they are not being treated fairly, others pick up on this behavior, and it results in a medical staff that is unwilling to put forth their best in their daily work.

There are many studies that relate the happiness of workers to on the job performance, and the healthcare field should focus on these factors because good outcome is necessary. According to the article “Nurses and shift work: effects on job performance and job-related stress”, nurses are more or less stressed based on the specific shift they are expected to work (Coffey, 1988). Overall performance was better for nurses who worked during the day, and performance was poorer for nurses who worked nights and weekends. Not coincidentally, the stress patterns are directly related to the amount of nurses available during those time periods. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are best staffed during the day during normal business hours, and these numbers dwindle in the evening. As a consequence, nurses who work at night have less assistance and have more stress because they have the same volume of patients and are required to figure out how to do more work to help the patients; this is often impossible.

Summary

The nursing shortage has contributed to a staffing crises that diminishes the nursing team’s ability to help patients. Nurses become more stressed when they are required to work longer hours, and this is made worse by the fact that they have little assistance. It is necessary to find ways to increase hospital staffing in order to ensure that nurses are able to work normal hours and provide maximal benefit to his or her patients.

Resources

Aiken, L. H. (2002). Commentary. Medical Care Research and Review, 59(2), 215–222.

Coffey LC, Skipper JK Jr, Jung FD. (1988). Nurses and shift work: effects on job performance and job-related stress. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3372899

Roman, L. M. (2008). Nursing shortage: Looking to the future. RN, 71(3), 34-41.